Happy Father’s Day: Your New King of the “Dad Movie” Is … Matt Damon!

As venerable ’80s and ’90s icons age away from the center of Hollywood and their formerly youthful fans age into fatherly and even grandfatherly roles, making low-to-mid-budget Dad Movies has become a lucrative gig (and an easy way to get funding for a non-franchise, non-family-friendly, non-horror genre movie). Guys like Kevin Costner, Liam Neeson, and Denzel Washington have all made their versions of these movies, as well as some relative upstarts like Gerard Butler. (Yes, this is a field where a 54-year-old man counts as a relative upstart.) Clint Eastwood is their king, making genuinely personal and idiosyncratic art where he still plays raspy old men who occasionally get to have threesomes. But while this (relatively) younger star has never exactly picked up a gun to pursue bloody vengeance against corrupt whippersnappers, there’s a stealth king of the Dad Movie, developing more prestigious variations on this format: Meet Matt Damon, America’s Dad Movie king.

More liberal than Costner or Eastwood, more traditionally handsome than Butler or Neeson, and less intense than Washington, Damon began his career with a whole other archetype: The rough-hewn golden boy, playing geniuses with street cred in movies like Good Will Hunting and Rounders, then complicating that image with daring choices like The Talented Mr. Ripley and self-spoofing ones like Ocean’s 11. In retrospect, Damon’s first real taste of Dad Cinema came with The Bourne Identity, the Robert Ludlum novel series he turned into a hit film franchise. As the 2000s wore on, Damon mostly seemed to be following the Clooney playbook, whether actually starring opposite him or working with some of their mutual faves (the Coen Brothers; Steven Soderbergh). But the Bourne movies were something different; Clooney never had a serious-minded action franchise like that.

Over the past five years, Damon has seemingly gone Full Dad, even when he’s not literally playing fathers. (To be clear, a Dad Movie is something with comfortable, well-worn appeal; it doesn’t have to be about fathers, or even aimed at fathers, or men. It’s just a stereotypical watching-TNT-on-a-Sunday-afternoon type of movie starring men of a certain age.) The Last Duel is a medieval drama about knights and honor. Air has Damon playing a Nike exec who proves his middle-aged just-plain-folks worth by signing Michael Jordan. (Somehow, the movie is able to rely on Damon, a millionaire, to obscure the fact that his supposedly last-chance character is also extremely wealthy by most standards.) The car-building drama Ford v. Ferrari is destined to be stumbled upon by channel-flipping dads and watched to the end until, well, the end of time. It will somehow keep the dwindling linear TV model alive by itself if it has to. Oppenheimer was the Dad Movie that became an international sensation, turning us all into de facto dads, rapt with attention at the details of the Manhattan Project, glorying to Damon’s impatient fuming at the geniuses in his wake. Time was, Damon might have been the guy considered to play Oppenheimer himself; now, he’s a weirdly perfect fit as a surly general.

Damon still brings plenty of shadings to these parts. In the less-seen Stillwater, he plays a working-class American dad who visits France, hoping to help his imprisoned daughter (the story is inspired by, though decidedly different from, the Amanda Knox case). It’s easy to imagine Liam Neeson breaking his daughter of French prison and personally dodging extradition on a rough-and-ready journey back to the States (Neeson would do all of this while still sounding faintly Irish). But Stillwater has gentle culture-clash drama alongside its thriller plotting – though at times it does feel as if Damon is slipping into Middle American drag, especially when matched with his excellent (and similarly midwestern) work in 2017’s flop Downsizing. Downsizing satirizes American consumption and the middle-class squeeze, and – like Soderbergh’s The Informant! – allows Damon to subvert the haloed promise he tended to show in his younger parts. Stillwater, by contrast, sometimes feels like it’s part of a mission to Understand the Trump Voter. But the movie’s elements of noir, and the humanity it finds across borders, keeps it from feeling like embarrassing Hollywood dress-up.

Damon’s image has gotten so much more stolid that his closest imitator barely turns on the traditional movie star charisma at all. When Jesse Plemons popped on Breaking Bad, much was made of his resemblance to Damon (hence “Meth Damon”), and much of his career since then has sometimes echoed the older actor: Working with Scorsese and Spielberg, doing super-deadpan comedy, and generally behaving like an All-American boy gone slightly to seed. Yet something about Plemons characters are a little too stiff, or sometimes too weak-willed, to make for classic Dad Movie heroes; if they’re Dad Movies, they don’t hit that designation because of Plemons. Damon really rides the line – all-American, but not too handsome; smart, but not too clever; consistently mayhem-adjacent.

The next Damon movie, too, has Dad Movie vibes: He’s reuniting with his Bourne Identity director Doug Liman for The Instigators, a blue-collar heist caper with heavy Boston accents. It seems like a missed opportunity that it’s not being released around Father’s Day. If a Gerard Butler action movie is a Father’s Day gift that’s so on-the-nose that it might start to feel a little insulting – the golf-themed greeting card of Dad Cinema – then a later-period Matt Damon thriller shows a little more thought given to the man underneath the dad clichés.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.